Three days off work for two weeks' holiday? This seems an ideal opportunity for a mass downing of tools
It is being called a great national celebration, and a public holiday. But curiously, not a grand national holiday. Yet the odd coincidence of Easter and the royal wedding means that just three days off work will open up nearly a fortnight of free time from 22 April (Good Friday) to 2 May (spring bank holiday). This is indeed an opportunity for a grand national holiday, the radical proposal imagined by the shoemaker-socialist William Benbow in 1830. Benbow, a chartist, who was one of the earliest pamphleteers to articulate the idea of a labour theory of value, called for a whole month's holiday to promote the happiness and liberty of all mankind. "Equal rights, equal liberties, equal enjoyments, equal toil, equal respect, equal share of production: this is the object," he proposed, a period "to cease from manual labour, and to cultivate [our] minds". The holidaymakers, he thought, could feast on the largesse of the great liberal politicians of the time, the Cokes of Norfolk and Whitbreads of Bedfordshire, while the lord chancellor, Henry Brougham, would be their delegate to the Congress that was to run in parallel. Unhappily, it seemed Benbow had overestimated both the readiness of the liberal families to allow the workers to help themselves to their cattle and the enthusiasm of the workers for taking it. In 1840, despite speaking for 10 hours in his own defence, he was convicted of sedition and ? although the evidence is inconclusive ? seems to have died in prison soon afterwards.
Conservatives Employment law Psychology Winter sports Eric Pickles Joey Barton
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